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On October 1, 2013, the US Deptment of Health and Human Services will expect all of America's health care providers to have transitioned their business bookkeeping and transaction records to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) standards. Although the latest set of the so-called ICD codes (International Classification of Diseases), called ICD-10, were rolled out in 1992, a study by the Medical Group Management Association estimates that the cost for each U.S. hospital simply to change its forms and retrain its office managers could exceed $2 million.

Why the change? The term "disease" has been stretched somewhat since the ICD was first implemented after World War II. Now the system is being used to classify every kind of conceivable ailment; and now healthcare professionals and office managers are being expected to comprehend a system of codes that has expanded from just over 10,000 classifications (ICD-9) to potentially over 140,000 (ICD-10).

New technologies, such as collaboration tools and mobile devices, create new opportunities for enterprises to innovate and provide better customer service. But they also introduce new costs and new risks.

In an executive brief sponsored by Qwest Business, IDC outlines the security, compliance and cost issues facing the organization of today.

Companies of all sizes must retain large and growing volumes of data - and retain this data for longer - in order to satisfy business and regulatory requirements. And the costs of preserving terabytes of log and application data over long periods of time, while also keeping the information secure and instantly available, can be incredibly high.

In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.

The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.

Enterprises are hamstrung by regulations and governance policies. It's just a fact of life. As enterprises struggle with the need to remain compliant, the exploding popularity of web 2.0 tools and social applications are forcing conversations about trying to strike a happy compromise. Although the notion of "command and control" is unpopular within the 2.0 community, in the Enterprise it's the law. Strict rules govern who has access to what data and which communications must be monitored and archived (in some cases for years). Complicating matters further, compliance regulations vary from country to country.